Seasonal
What Is Ready to Pick at Mercier, and Roughly When
Featured
U-pick is a crop, not an opening time. A family arriving for apples in early August finds peaches, and one arriving for strawberries in July finds nothing.
Photograph: Unsplash
Seasonal
Where the Leaf Front Is, and How to Find Out Before You Leave
- By Wyatt Ledford
- Published
- Last updated
- Seasonal
There is no peak date, only a front that comes down the mountain. The county spans about 2,300 feet of elevation, and that is the whole forecast.
UnsplashEvery autumn somebody asks for the exact weekend the leaves peak here, and there is no honest answer. The range moves by a week and a half between years. What does not move is the mechanism, and once you have it you can work out where colour is without asking anyone.
Fannin County spans roughly 2,300 feet from its lowest ground to its highest. McCaysville sits at about 1,460 feet, the town of Blue Ridge at 1,762, Lake Blue Ridge at around 1,686 at full summer pool, and Springer Mountain at 3,770. Leaves turn at the top well before they turn at the bottom, and the front comes downhill over about three weeks.
That means the high country, the ridge tops and the approach to Springer, often turns in the first half of October. Cabin country and the ridge roads above the lake usually follow in the second half. The town, the lake shoreline and the Toccoa valley are the last to go, frequently running into the first week of November. The scenic railway follows the lowest ground in the county, which is why a ride booked after the ridges have gone bare can still run through good colour.
To check before you travel: Georgia State Parks runs a Leaf Watch programme through the season with park-by-park reports and the #GaLeafWatch tag, and links a national fall foliage prediction map. The Fannin County Chamber of Commerce reports locally. Recent tagged photographs from Blue Ridge and Aska are the most current source available because they carry a date. A forecast published in August is not worth planning around.
There is also a free field test. Driving up GA-515, watch the ridges either side and find the line where colour stops and green begins. If that line is well above the road, you are early and should go high. If it has reached the valley floor, the tops are already finished and the river is where you want to be.
One local signal worth knowing: sourwood turns deep red while everything around it is still green, sometimes in September. When the sourwoods light up along the county roads, general colour is still two to four weeks away.
SourcingElevations per US Geological Survey figures as published for each place. Leaf Watch, the #GaLeafWatch tag and the linked prediction map per Georgia State Parks. No peak date is asserted here because none is knowable in advance.
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Who reported this
Wyatt Ledford
Trails & Rivers Editor
Wyatt guided on the Toccoa and the Ocoee before he wrote about either, and still reads the week by the dam release schedule rather than the calendar. He covers the national forest end of this county: Forest Service roads, the Benton MacKaye Trail, trout water and leaf timing. He will tell you a waterfall is a cascade rather than a plunge before you drive forty minutes of gravel to find out.
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